Fiction

March 8, 2021 Issue

The Crooked House

By Jonathan Lethem

March 1, 2021

The week he met the man who claimed to have exited the house by
falling downward into a desert valley, Mull decided to give up
coffee.

Mull had lost regular access to the community cafeteria and its
coffee supply. The corridor leading to it had disappeared, in one of
the building’s periodic shifts. But he could still see into the cafeteria.
The window of his dormitory room opened onto the scene from high
above, offering a bird’s-eye view. When Mull cracked the window,
he could smell the rising steam of the coffee brewing.

Mull, after laboring through the now elusive corridor, had rarely
found others in the cafeteria. Just coffee in the twenty-pot urn. Once
or twice the supply had been down to dregs. Those times, Mull had
brewed a fresh urn himself, from supplies stacked there. Others
probably did the same, though he’d never caught them at it. The
scene was hardly scintillating to watch, once one adjusted to the
surveillance-camera perspective.

Still, he glanced through the window. Should the woman for whom
Mull searched appear in the cafeteria, he could try again to relocate
the corridor. He might even risk a plunge through the window,
aiming himself at an empty area of floor. Coffee alone, however,
wasn’t worth it. Long before, Mull had concluded that accepting the
loss of inessential things was an elemental lesson that his present
life, his life since entering the tesseractic house, had to teach him.
Coffee was just the latest sacrifice.

The last time he’d been in the corridor, it had been almost
completely blocked. Occupants of the San Pedro overpass had
located a new one-way hatch into the house and begun shoving their
possessions through: filthy bedding, shopping bags stuffed with
clothing and keepsakes, photograph albums, nonworking
electronics, baby strollers full not of children but of children’s toys,
and unrecognizable other stuff, bundled with twine or extension
cords or jammed into cardboard cartons loosely flapped shut. Mull
had picked his way through the debris, fearful of accidentally
treading on a sleeping body.

These days, he frequented the atrium. It was there that he met the
man who spoke of the desert window. The atrium had food, though
no coffee. Some volunteers had dragged a steam table in from the
kitchen and most days it was loaded with hot food. If not, piles of
sandwiches. No one oversaw the serving, or kept track of what was
taken. Meals merely waited for takers. Some might load a shopping
cart with sandwiches to distribute elsewhere, but no one had ever
carted away the steam table itself. The food continued to be
supplied, for now.

The atrium, which in the original plan had voiced both the grandiose
and the bureaucratic aspects of the building, was ruined. Its central
purpose, as a portal from the outside, had been lost in the first
collapse. Little remained of its original splendor. The celebrated
“night sky” ceiling, depicting the astrological figures, had fallen, its
tiles collected as souvenirs or trodden into grit on the vast floor.

Nevertheless, the atrium’s ruins served as the clearest echo of the

architect’s vision. Was this why residents treated it with reverence?
No one slept there. Conversation was scarce and hushed. In contrast
to the dormitories, the atmosphere was churchlike. Mull also
regarded it as a crossroads, where he could scan for familiar faces
and perhaps find the woman, Rose Gutiérrez. Mull still remembered,
more days than not, that he was here to keep a promise to find her.

“Seen you round,” the man said.

A greeting that strangely mimicked a farewell, it left Mull

momentarily speechless. When he managed to say, “Oh, hey,” it
came out as a croak. His voice—when had he used it last? He
cleared his throat and tried again. “You mean inside?” he asked the
man. “Or before?”

Mull had been sitting against a wall in the atrium, slurping at broth
with one of the inadequate plastic spoons that were the sole utensil
provided. Others nearby, whether eating or only resting, kept their
distance. The hippieish drifter, on the other hand, plopped down
beside Mull now, even as he made his enigmatic reply: “Oh, I seen
you both places.”

At first, Mull had taken the lanky man for eighteen or nineteen, but
no. His face was sun-lined, though he was pale, not tanned. He
might be in his forties, around Mull’s age. Mull hurriedly calculated:
crazy, hostile, or both? A newcomer to the house? Or a longtime
resident, perhaps even one of those who had entered before the first
collapse?

Mull hedged his own reply. “Have we met?”

“Didn’t say that. I just recognized a fellow wanderer first time I laid
eyes on you.”

“Through a window?”

The man laughed. “There’s a lot of those. I been known to look.”

So far as Mull knew, there were no views into his dormitory. “I used
to get coffee every day at that cafeteria, that one with the mural of
the cruise ship—”

“Sure, yeah, I know it.”

“Maybe you saw me there.”

“Maybe.”

“Or through a window,” Mull suggested again. “I can see into that
cafeteria from above, myself.”

“You like down-facing windows, I got a good one. You like the
desert?”

“The desert?”

“Yeah. I’ll show you. I went through it once. Maybe you’ll want to
try.”

The window over the cafeteria wasn’t the only high vantage Mull
had encountered. Another window he’d discovered appeared to
dangle perilously a quarter mile or so above the glamorously tangled
intersection of the Santa Monica and San Diego Freeways. This
view was vertiginous. Most seemed to shun it, and the room that
contained it.

When he peered at the freeways, Mull found the activities below

mysteriously reduced, a subject of study to file away for another
time. It wasn’t that there were no cars, but there were fewer, and
whole intervals of bright daylight in which no cars appeared at all.
Once, Mull had seen a group of walkers on the freeway, a cluster of
eight or nine, centered in the empty lanes, moving together
northward, toward the old post office or beyond, out of sight.
But these windows were the exception. The preponderance of the
house’s windows or doorways looked into different parts of the
house. Others appeared to gaze upward from deep wells or pits in
the earth. It seemed to Mull that these windows told a truth. Yes, the
four-dimensional collapse contained enigmas. Likely the house still
unfolded itself spatially with each aftershock. Yet the structure
hadn’t been able to defy the simple law of gravity. It had
reorganized its geometry downward. Since the start of the
earthquakes, Mull and the population of the formerly unsheltered
were essentially living underground.

It was only a short distance from the atrium to the drifter’s desert
window, which lay hidden behind a maintenance door, at the back of
a room full of breaker boxes and wiring panels. The frame wasn’t
large, though wide enough to clamber through. The view was
panoramic. Yellow scrub to a horizon of sand, sky-petitioning
Joshua trees, molten-appearing rock formations. Had Mull never
visited the desert east of Los Angeles, he could have mistaken it for
Mars.

“You really went through.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“How did you get back?” Mull asked.

“I hitchhiked back, from J-Tree. It ain’t that far.”

“Why did you return?”

The man shrugged. “Nothing else to do.”

“How did you get back inside?” Mull was interested, generally, to
know which entrances were in use. The one he’d used had closed.
Yet still new faces appeared. The numbers grew.
“I came through the train tunnel, under Union Station.” This reply
took a moment. Was the man uninterested? Or unremembering?

“Have the trains quit running?”

“Maybe.”

The drifter’s tale of escape and return tested Mull’s credulity. For
one thing, the height of the desert window looked to Mull too
dangerous to risk bridging with a leap. And there was no sign of
shelter below. No road out of that blasting sunlight. One wouldn’t
have to break one’s legs in the fall to die of thirst, such distance
from help. Even a turned ankle could be fatal.

The man’s account was too vague. Had he observed nothing during
his sojourn outside the house? Mull had yet to meet anyone who’d
persuasively gone outside and returned; the matter of the present
state of the wider city was, for Mull, an open one. Perhaps there was
no city to return to now, not as he’d known it.

In any case, Mull had put aside the question of whether he would be
capable of exiting the house if he wished. All windows and doors
worked in one direction only. For instance, when Mull had crawled
over the debris and tried the hatch in the now disappeared corridor,
it had led to another point deep inside the house. This was typical.

Mull had no idea whether he could still transit outside. His own
entry point had grown remote as the house unfolded itself through
the series of earthquake collapses. Would his car still be parked on
the other side of the door through which he’d entered, at the bottom
of the public stairs where Reservoir Street descended to Glendale
Boulevard? It might have been stripped for parts by now. Even
beyond his uncertainty about the condition of the city outside,
Mull’s sense of time had been damaged by his residence in the
house.
Mull excused himself from the window. The vision of the desert was
entrancing but nauseating. So different from the life he’d learned
inside. The drifter said nothing. Mull, as he left, attempted to
memorize the turns that led to this place, another possible subject of
his study.

Environmental analysis. That had been Mull’s field, when the

earthquakes began and the house first fell. He could barely recall
now what it was supposed to entail. He’d studied the Los Angeles
River, the secret system of concrete channels, as often dry as
carrying a trickle of moisture, which went ignored by most
Angelenos. The fenced zones zigzagging alongside the freeways
were home to wildlife—to lizards and frogs, swimming rats, weird
herons—and to unsheltered humans, with their tents, their carts,
their fires. Mull had liked to think he was “working” on that
intractable problem. Though, in comparison with the intervention of
the church volunteers, the food banks, and the charity medical
clinics, anything Mull had to offer was paltry, theoretical. He
reported to no one. No office of the city waited for his results.

Few students had ever affiliated with Mull, choosing him as an

adviser, say, or to supervise their thesis work. His classes were a
requirement in the architecture major; otherwise they’d have been
empty. The handful of disciples Mull attracted tended to be those
with roots in the wider city, sometimes older students. Others were
transfers from the community colleges and living alone or with their
families rather than in the dorms. Often the type to wander from
college, into trades or the military, or off the radar entirely. Mull had
felt more than once that if he were faithful to his ambivalence he’d
have followed them out of the institution, to set up a life by the river.

Mull had been spending more time there, testing himself for exile,
before the earthquakes. He’d leased an in-law house from a friend,
ostensibly a “writing studio.” It backed onto a wide embankment,
accessible through a rent in the fencing. The river’s concrete was
streaked with white trails of bird shit, liquid ejections stretched by
velocity into a kind of hieroglyphic language, if only Mull could
read it.

At the channel’s edge, where the rain’s surges deposited refuse, one
bare tree sheltered a gnarl of sun-bleached junk, stuff pitched
through car windows from overpasses. Most days, Mull was alone at
this crap oasis, his personal Walden. Few of the tent-dwelling people
chose Mull’s embankment. Perhaps that was because of the lack of
shade, perhaps because Mull, in his studio, seemed to the tent
dwellers to be surveilling the area.

The time leading to Mull’s decision to enter the house had been
marked by a series of catastrophic occurrences. The earthquakes, but
not merely the earthquakes. In the contemplative vacuum of his
present life those events stacked in memory, as if they’d transpired
in a matter of days, or hours. In truth, it had been almost five months
from the first earthquake to the moment when Mull committed
himself to searching for Rose Gutiérrez.

An example: it was at the third press conference on the subject of

the collapse, not the first, that the assassination attempt had
occurred. The televised presentations were already threatening to
become routine, always the same three men on the stage, flanked by
policemen and press secretaries: the slim dapper mayor; the
beleaguered president of the housing authority; the architect Quintus
Burnham, with his shock of white hair teased to the ceiling, his
black collarless suit, his red-framed glasses, looking as though he
belonged more on the stage of the Cannes Film Festival. Their
incomprehensible maps and charts, attempts to track the rescue
efforts, to decipher the shape the structure had taken as it settled and
settled again.

Who had been the assassin’s target? The architect took the only
bullet, in his spine. Just days before Mull entered the house,
Burnham had reappeared on television, a glimpsed form in a
wheelchair, hair still coiffed. Why had Mull been so glued to the
news? In his recollection, he’d been watching live the morning that
the L.A.P.D. perp-walked the would-be assassin: Mull’s onetime
student James Gutiérrez.

As it happened, Mull had once been at a dinner party with the

architect. At a private home, that of an author Mull knew, a
glamorous type, who’d married the sister of the mayor. Though the
man never spoke aloud any suggestion of access or influence, this
association by marriage conveyed an air of civic celebrity that the
author plainly relished.

Burnham seemed to style himself a man of action, in some mid-

twentieth-century Hemingway or Picasso sense. His only battles, so
far as Mull could tell, had been with aggrieved civic institutions, or
with neighbors of his proposed incursions upon sunlight or airspace.
The money that flowed everywhere around men like Burnham
guaranteed that he vanquished all such opponents.

Another thing Burnham vanquished was dinner parties. At least this

one. His monologue began lightly enough, with a disquisition on
Los Angeles as the site of a contest between flatness and what he
called stepped tessellations. “The richer and crazier you are”—here
Mull began instantly to hate him, for this romantic conflation—“the
likelier you are to occupy a tessellated planar environment. The
simplest example is the standard canyon house. Notched into a
ravine, turning a buttressed backside to anyone approaching from
below. But the spectacular examples are those private homes the
studios rent, at great expense, to play the domiciles of villains in
science-fiction movies—”

Mull tuned out. He looked to his table companion at his left for a
side conversation. A woman he knew, who’d left academia to serve
on the city’s planning commission. She, too, gave signs of
impatience with Burnham’s preening. She had to explain it to Mull,
who was being a little slow. Burnham had sold the city on his
solution to the problem of Skid Row. The tens of thousands living
unsheltered, the tent cities strung along miles of streets. That
explained the confluence of guests here. Burnham’s table talk was a
rehearsal for the public unveiling of his plan, the tesseractic shelter.

The dinner concluded with Burnham’s toast to the partnership.

“Why shouldn’t our refugees from late-stage capitalism participate
in the wonders of hypercubic spatiality? You don’t have to
understand a house to live in it.”

It struck Mull, at the time, as tendentious. Crypto-scientific

nonsense. He left before dessert.

Lately Mull wondered if Burnham had, in a sense, delivered exactly

what he’d proposed. The psychic catastrophe of unapproachable
canyon houses, windows that functioned as one-way glass, rooms
locked in abutment, like coffins. All of these had been the domain
exclusively of the canyon dwellers. Burnham had brought such
marvels to those finding shelter along the overpasses and riverside
embankments. Should he be blamed for the earthquakes? Some
claimed that the faults had been triggered by the anchoring of the
structure to the bedrock. Yet Los Angeles had been overdue.

In any case, the collapses had turned Burnham’s revolutionary

shelter into its own opposite. At its unveiling, the tesseractic house
had been a kaleidoscopic tower, impossible to gaze upon except
from below. Now it could be seen only by peering into apertures in
the ground. Sinkholes, some of which might even be dangerous to
approach. In a time of continual earthquakes, the windows into the
earth could only inspire fear.

There’d been more aftershocks the day Mull had been in the visiting
room at Men’s Central, talking with James Gutiérrez. Entombed in
the windowless vault of the jail, Mull took the rumbling for trains
passing by on their way to Union Station. None of the prisoners on
their telephones seemed to notice it at all. Yet the guards
immediately began talking on their radios about earthquakes, and
Mull understood.

Gutiérrez had shaved his head. He was heavier and more slow-
moving than the hectic and furious kid Mull remembered from his
class, as though formed now of denser molecules.

Gutiérrez had been told by his guards that the architect had survived.
Mull didn’t choose to ask whether Burnham had been the lone
intended target or one target among many.

“Motherfucking house swallowed my mother,” the prisoner said.

The words were ferocious, but spoken in a meditative monotone. All
anger seemed to have exited the teen-ager’s body, or blended into
the ambient rage of his surroundings.

“They’re alive in there,” Mull offered stupidly. “It’s not like they’re
pulling out bodies.”

“What kind of alive?”

Mull had no answer to this.

“Human garbage disposal, I call it. Urban removal.”

Mull recognized the last term, one he’d introduced in his lectures on
East St. Louis, Tulsa, Robert Moses, the Housing Act of 1949.

“If I understand the complexities of the house,” Mull said, speaking

carefully, “many of the people inside may not know what’s
happened out here. They may be living just like they were before the
collapse.”
They’d spoken for perhaps fifteen minutes when the second temblor
hit. At that, the guards declared the visits finished. An order had
come to clear the rooms. Before he racked the receiver, Gutiérrez
said, “You find her. Tell her what I did.” This request’s pass-the-salt
mildness induced confusion in Mull.

“Your mother?”

“Go in the house. Tell her, Professor Mull.”

The specificity of this address could have been mocking, caustic

even, had Mull’s former student not lowered his eyes in—modesty?
Shyness? Shame? Perhaps all of these, or none. James Gutiérrez
likely knew no other name to call him.

Mull’s wish to avoid seeing the desert drifter again too soon kept
him from the atrium for the next days. He needed to renew his
search for the prisoner’s mother, or so he told himself. He’d been
puzzling, too, over the replenishment of the food, and other staples,
like toilet paper. For that matter, how had the pipes kept water
flowing after the collapses, which ought to have ruptured most if not
all of the plumbing? Was the house being maintained from the
outside? Necessarily so. Yet Mull had never seen a crew, or found
evidence of the supply chain for what appeared in the cafeteria. Was
the city administration responsible, or had something taken its
place? Were the residents of the house beneficiaries of a humane
intervention, or rats in a scientist’s maze?

What Mull had begun to observe was that the house seemed to bend
him toward three or four destinations, as though determined to
thwart his wider mapping effort. Near though it was to the atrium, he
never would have found the service closet in which the desert
window was hidden. The doors Mull chose tended to dump him into
familiar corridors, those that terminated in his dormitory wing, or
ones that led back to the atrium. It was as if some subroutine had
executed a misguided directive to spare him effort or confusion, to
shrink his residency’s scale. Could the house be adapting itself in
this way to each occupant?

Moving alone through the rooms, he moved as though through a

prism, reflections of the same exhausted territories. Eventually he’d
find himself alone in his dormitory room, facing his bed.

The answer was to pick another body and follow it on its route. By
that means, Mull could break the spell. He began trailing others
along the corridors, walking at a discreet distance, the length of a
room or two, yet close enough to keep that other person within his
sight.

In this way, Mull found himself led to further wings of the collapsed
house. He located, among other things, a gymnasium, complete with
a pool, which he’d never known existed. When he blundered into the
cavernous facility he found it populated by older women.

“This isn’t for you,” one informed him, before he could apologize.

“Do you know someone named Rose Gutiérrez?” Plashing echoes

swallowed his words.

“You shouldn’t be here,” the woman informed him.

“Will you tell her I need to speak with her?” Mull was seized with
the certainty that the prisoner’s mother was one of the bodies
arrayed on the far side of the enormous pool, or immersed in the
lanes.

“Please go.”

At the conclusion of any bout of following, Mull fell into a narcotic

sleep. He’d wake hungry and reduced, seeking solace in routine, in
reliable sites for feeding and washing. In this state, it nauseated him
to contemplate the complexities of the house. He could barely
stomach his usual routes, or afford glimpses through crooked,
paradoxical thresholds. It felt as though the house had punished the
attempts to widen his orbit.

The habit of tracking, however, was now an addiction. He returned

to the atrium only to find unknown persons to follow out of it. On
his fourth morning of doing so, Mull observed that the figure ahead
of him seemed also to be tracking another.

He’d selected a man who’d visited the atrium alone. The man was
young, dressed in long shorts and Air Jordans. He wore a small
backpack but was otherwise unencumbered, no cart, no bags of
Tupperware to ferry away supplies. He’d browsed the 

steam table in a cursory way and then headed back through the
corridor.

Mull was quickly drawn into unfamiliar portions of the house, or

portions formerly familiar, now rendered strange. He trailed the man
through a room of built-in library carrels, never outfitted with the
intended computer terminals, which Mull recognized from his
earliest days. In some settling action after one of the earthquakes,
the room had lodged sideways, and sleepers, after first smashing out
the interior dividers, employed the carrels as a series of bunks.

It was in the next corridor that Mull spotted the other man, far
ahead. Another voyager through rooms, shadowed by the man Mull
himself was shadowing.

The distant figure slipped around corners before Mull could discern
much. He was older than the man in shorts between them, and
dressed less like one of the unsheltered who’d moved into the house
at the start, more like Mull. The default costume of the average
white man, which Mull had chosen, half-consciously, for its
invisibility.
Mull couldn’t see far enough ahead. The man he followed blocked
his view. Mull struggled with the urge to dash forward. He didn’t
want to draw attention, raise an alarm in his own target. Yet, should
he warn the man beyond, that figure cutting out of view again and
again? Was that man in danger?

Attending to this double chase, Mull failed at first to register the

alteration in the rooms. They’d become familiar in some different
sense. Not from his residency but from his visit to Men’s Central, to
see the prisoner James Gutiérrez. The dun-colored cement-block
walls, the linoleum floor, the green-painted metal sliding barriers—
hard to call them doors. They’d entered it, somehow. The collapsing
underground structure had melded with the jail, or the jail had
tunnelled itself into the tesseractic house. They’d been less than a
mile apart to begin with, Mull supposed. On either side of the
disused train yards. He shouldn’t be so surprised that they’d met.

Now he looked up again, not wishing to fall behind in his pursuit. It

seemed all the more essential that he keep sight not only of the man
he’d chosen to follow but of that other, vanishing ahead.

When he spotted them again, racing along a row of holding cells, the
man between had closed on his quarry.

All at once, Mull saw that it wasn’t that the far man was dressed as
Mull was, or that he resembled him. The man ahead of the man Mull
followed was Mull himself. Mull had chased and been chased. Been
ahead and behind, both. The house had worked as a refracting lens.

Two others came from within the open-gated cells, to join in the
capture. At that, Mull was no longer behind, watching. He was in
their hands.

Though the cell they placed him in was open, it was nevertheless a
cell. The drifter who’d shown him the desert window had joined the
men who held Mull there, and regarded him again with the same
snickering familiarity.

“Told you I seen you.”

The words unexpectedly stung. Among the illusions they’d stripped

from Mull was his belief in his invisibility. But this hardly mattered
now. Mull needed to understand the relation between the structures.

“Did the building fall into the jail?” he asked them. “Or did the
prisoners . . . escape?”

“We’re all prisoners,” said the man Mull had been following and
who had been following him.

“One building all along?”

“You need me to say it?” the man said. “One building all along.”

“Talk to a kid named Gutiérrez,” Mull said. “He’ll explain.”

“Gutiérrez isn’t a kid, no more than me,” the man said. Mull had to
grant the case. That Mull was thirty years older didn’t make them
kids.

“He sent me searching for his mother.”

“Everybody’s searching for someone,” the drifter said. “We got a lot
of explanations, too.”

“Gutiérrez takes care of his mom,” another man said. “He don’t
need you searching no more.”

“He sent you to do this?” Mull asked. They kept him pinned,
needlessly. Yet nothing felt gratuitous in their attitudes or postures.
Mull sensed instead their clarity of intention.
Only the drifter was giddy. “Everybody’s sent, or else they’re
sending!” he quipped.

“Are you going to lock me in here?” Mull asked.

“We lost the keys,” the man Mull had followed said. “We don’t like
to put people deeper in. We like to put them deeper out.”

“Deeper out,” the drifter said, shaking his head. “Damn, I like that.”
As if on a signal, Mull’s captors had him on his feet, to frog-march
him through the open gate of the cell. Then, true to their word, they
pushed him screaming through the desert window.

The plunge wasn’t as far as he’d feared. Mull ended on all fours atop
a soft knoll, his left arm sunk to the elbow into some creature’s
burrow. Here, from the ground, he saw what he couldn’t from the
window: a sand-strewn asphalt roadway, lined by the twisted,
mocking trees. Beyond them, desert stones, those wind-carved
orange bodies sleeping beneath the unreachable bridge of the sky.
Nothing prevented Mull from setting out west, toward the house. He
supposed he could find his way back inside. 
(https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/08/the-crooked-house Retrieved on March
4, 2021)